Illustration by Joseph Daniel Fiedler

The "How Berkeley Can You Be!?" parade and festival—an event local organizers proudly bill as "part question, part challenge, all celebration"—will mark its 14th anniversary this September. Berkeleyans of every stripe will march down Telegraph. Following tradition, some of the marchers may be nude, many will be costumed, and nearly all of them will be making a statement of one sort or another. This is, after all, a big part of what it means to be "Berkeley": Everyone gets their say.

Probably no one in Berkeley ever made a more revealing statement than Andrew Martinez, who as a Cal student in the early '90s, became nationally famous as the Naked Guy. Just by taking off his clothes and going about his business in the buff, he seemed to become the very embodiment of the more radical aspects of the Berkeley spirit: a question, a challenge, and a celebration all in one. In the process, he also tested Berkeley's idea of itself as a bastion of tolerance.

Like well-meaning parents, both the University and the city were tolerant of Martinez's "militant nudism"—his own preferred term for what he was up to—at first. For a semester, he was allowed to attend classes naked, and although he was arrested for jogging in the nude one night near the dorms, the charges were dropped after the prosecutor reasoned that nudity without lewd behavior didn't break any laws. It was only after some female students lodged complaints about the Naked Guy's state of undress that the University adopted a rule explicitly forbidding nudity on campus. Martinez was finally expelled after turning up at a disciplinary hearing—naked. The city followed suit seven months later, adopting an anti-nudity ordinance in July 1993. Martinez was the first person arrested under the new law. He showed up at City Hall to protest its passage—naked—and was sentenced to two years probation.

Through it all, the Naked Guy's fame soared. Overnight, it seemed, he became a de facto emissary from Berzerkeley, that fabled republic where, in the popular imagination at least, anything goes. People who couldn't locate San Francisco Bay on a map had nevertheless heard on CNN all about the Naked Guy's exploits and watched him on the daytime talk shows, sitting there with his crotch blurred out, calmly fielding questions as audience members gasped and giggled.

No doubt the Naked Guy's "success" was partly a result of his looks. Tall and dark with a physique suitable for a study in bronze or marble, he may be the only person ever to have appeared in both Playgirl and Playboy. Still, his attraction was more than skin-deep. By all accounts, Martinez was also charismatic and kind. Even on television, under the glare of the studio lights, he seemed preternaturally calm and unselfconscious. He was disarming precisely because he did not give off the creepy-crazy vibes one expects to emanate from a man strolling campus in nothing but a book bag and flip-flops.

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